Dutchsmurf said:Exactly, because half of those will have crashed somewhere already. The last time the Tour used cobbles, there wouldn't have been any selection at all if Frank Schleck (or someone else later) hadn't crashed. That crash caused the selection, not the cobbles.
You get 10+ teams all trying to get their GC man at front with every cobble section or hill. That makes each of those sections a crash waiting to happen. Even more because unlike Paris-Roubaix or Amstel Gold there will be riders who aren't as skilled on those sections and therefor will be more likely to fall. It will be exciting, but it won't do anything to make crashes happen less often. Mountains work for that, cobbles and hills don't.
From my point of view, there will always be crashes in the first week of the tour, no matter what stages you have. Even if you put a HC summit finish on stage 1, there will still be crashes on stages 2 - 6, since teams are racing for some glory / tv time / stage wins plus add in nerves etc.
If you accept crashes are inevitable (and I do), there needs to be a way to try and ensure that one crash doesnt ruin a GC rider's chances at the overall (as happened yesterday on Stage 6 for so many riders).
Other than nuetralising the entire first week, surely the best way to do that is to have a whole stack of super hard stages in the first week. That way, if you lose time on a flat stage due to a crash, you can take back time on the Ardennes type stage or you can take it back on the cobbled stage etc.
Having a selection of stages (sprint, cobbled, ardennes, cobbled hills, etc) will force teams to pick a wider variety of riders too (ie ardennes riders, cobbled guys), rather than the current farce where a team like Argos picks 9 guys for the flat...
And this might sound callous, but if week 1 has to feature a load of crashes, at least the stages could be varied and interesting, rather than a succession of flat sprint stages marred with crashes... This thread does, after all, ask how would you make the tour more interesting, not how would you make the tour safer...